Wyoming wolf report Aug. 1 – 12, 2011

Federal government still doing WY wolf reports-

Although the state of Wyoming seems almost guaranteed to take over wolf management in Wyoming in the future, the federal government still manages wolves in the state and the population remains healthy at 19 packs (adult wolves with 2+ pups), and they cause little trouble with livestock. The latest report has a kill of 17 sheep, the largest in some time in WY. The total dead sheep for the year is only 28 (recall that USDA routinely each year reports hundreds and hundreds of unverified dead sheep and cattle).

The WY report below also gives links to Washington and Oregon official wolf news.

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

About The Author

Ralph Maughan

Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University with specialties in natural resource politics, public opinion, interest groups, political parties, voting and elections. Aside from academic publications, he is author or co-author of three hiking/backpacking guides, and he is President of the Western Watersheds Project.

11 Responses to Wyoming wolf report Aug. 1 – 12, 2011

From data tables, it appears there was a peak from~2005-2008 that has now leveled in terms of depredation and wolf control measures. I sincerely wish this were taken into consideration prior to establishing the type os season Wyoming intends, with hunting concentrated around areas of heavier depredation, and where it has been proven that wolves have had a decidedly negative impact on ungulate populations.

That would be management, not the plan to “persecute” wolves up to a point where they are relisted.

When wolves kill domestic sheep, (as in Dog Creek)shouldn’t some consideration be given to moving the sheep rather than killing the wolves? The current practice of dumping domestic sheep into known wolf territories/rendezvous sites during the summer months just invites predation.

Of course you are right. We have been arguing that for 16 years now, but sheep come first by order of our Western politics, especially certain politicians and parties. As you know, Representative Mike Simpson has put a section in the Interior budget bill to make it impossible move sheep on public lands even when they are giving pneumonia to one of your favorites — bighorn sheep.

A common definition of politics, learned by political science students, “politics is the process that determines who gets, what, when and how.”

Usually that bald truth is kept more or less covered from public view, but the Western Republicans have now made it very clear, and open how they allow a tiny elite to determine what happens to our wildlife.

I should add that in the past, In Idaho, Lava Lake Livestock, which is sheep operation of a different kind, actually has moved its sheep in response to losses to wolves. I don’t know what they are doing today.

On issues like this assertions are simply made with the politicians expecting that no one will ever question them seriously in a forum that matters to their political interests.

Now if Mead had said “wolf losses are so minor they are not worth talking about, so I will so no more about them,” he would be called to account, given the way Western politics is set up. However, he would survive the criticism easily because he was just elected and the number of people with a substantial economic interest in this are probably fewer than a hundred. It is the politician who will ocassionally step out and tell the truth that has become a rarity in American politics.

In 2010 Wyoming lost 37,100 cows and 14,800 sheep to NON-PREDATION(NASS 2010).

I declare the wolf emergency in Wyoming to be a fairy tail, a big fish story, a complete fabrication by agribusiness.

To have to keep repeating these statistics over and over, as if we’re all living in some freakish version of the movie Ground Hog Day, is mind blowing.

Deer kill more people then wolves every year. Hunters kill more people then wolves every year. Moose kill more people then wolves every year. As a matter of fact wolves haven’t killed anyone in the lower forty eight in over a hundred years. Yet here we are, on the verge of a wolf massacre, touted as “wolf management”.

Hope the Ninth Circuit grants the emergency injunction so I can stop thinking of wolves shot full of arrows or a wolf pup stuck in a trap for three days.

Calendar

Quote

‎"At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour."